The Descent

For over three decades Dr. Donald Perry has developed new methods for exploring and understanding the complex biological communities found in the tops of tropical trees.

His work has appeared on the covers of Scientific American, Smithsonian, and New York Sunday Times magazines. It was featured in Newsweek, Life, Geo, Paris Match, Quick of Germany, and numerous publications and documentaries worldwide.

Since the publication of Charles Darwin's book, The Descent
of Man, the ground has been considered the birthplace of humanity. Dr. Donald Perry's new book, The Descent, shatters this Theory.

• Why are we the best climbers on earth?
• Why do infants learn to climb as they learn
to walk? • Why can an infant hold its full body weight
with a single hand? • Why do we possess numerous features that
link us to a recent arboreal past?

The Descent contains a concise roadmap of human evolutionary change.
Never before has 200 million years of evolutionary
evidence been examined from an arboreal perspective. This evidence shows that only yesterday
in evolutionary time we were living in tree houses
high above the ground to escape the carnage of
night-stalking predators.

Human Canopy Evolution, the theory devolped in The Descent explains why fossil bones show that our ancestors had superhuman strength; why Acheulean hand axes are found in mud holes and streams; why early humans never slept in caves; why Neandertals went extinct; and why the human brain has been shrinking over the last 30,000 years.

Dr. Perry shows that at no time in evolutionary history has a relatively large brain evolved at the ground. Excepting the oceans, intelligent brains have only evolved among species that have climbed in trees. The mystery of where and why the brain evolved has been solved. Read More